In a move that will have privacy advocates worried, a white hat hacker demonstrated a rather scary way of intercepting cell phone calls at DefCon 2010. Using a $1,500 kit which included a laptop and two RF antennas, he successfully fooled GSM cell phones into believing that his little setup was a legitimate cell phone base station, which allowed him to intercept and record audience calls, highlighting a major flaw in the 2G GSM system which directs cell phones to connect to the tower of the strongest signal, regardless of the origin. The system currently is only able to intercept outbound calls, and the caller ID will probably warn the owner of the cell phone that something is amiss, but it’s still a rather worrying flaw that doesn’t seem to have an easy resolution at the moment.
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